Tough is the life of a distro reviewer, at least has been in the last months of 2015. One bad distro after
another. What is distro, baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me no more. That bad. Seriously, nothing good happened
this autumn. Crazily, Fedora 23 with its GNOME desktop was the closest to being a
sensible distro. A few others delivered okay, but when you expect mega wow, okay
just isn't good enough. Oh yes, Netrunner Rolling scored zero.

So you can imagine my apprehension ere this review, wondering if I'm going to have another bad day fighting
technology, regressions and retardation all combined. But let's be optimistic. The glass is half-full, even if
I like to drink from the bottle. To wit, Netrunner 17 Horizon, tested on my G50 machine, alongside Windows and many a Linux.

Live Event

Problems started by trying to copy the ISO to a thumb drive. Failure after failure, no matter what software I
used or what device. In the end, I had to do it the old school way, with an external DVD drive. But boot then
it did. The live session is very pleasing and cool and lovely. Extremely well designed, smooth, polished, sexy,
everything that Plasma should be. The colors are a bit plasticky, neony, but I likes them a lot. There's a
retro-80s new wave look about the distribution, and the dark tones plus blue and purple add to the ambiance.
The menu is activated with the Win (Super) key, a first time ever for KDE if I'm not mistaken. Lovely Jubbly.

The update icon needs to be shifted up a few pixels.

Dolphin also looks rad, but the image preview in the right pane should be lowered by about 3-4px so it aligns
with the top of the center frame where the files and folders are displayed.

Networking

Wireless worked fine, and you don't get a Wallet prompt. Copying to and fro Samba shares was spotless, which
only makes the Mint failure last week all the more infuriating. But then I'd
have been more forgiving if the bug did not come to bear within seconds into the live session. Never mind.
Printing does not seem to work. If you type printer(s), then invoke whatever the menu gives, nothing will
happen. You need to start the wizard in a different fashion, but that's for after the installation. Likewise,
Bluetooth, later on.

Multimedia playback

No complains except the default choice of the music player and the excess of available software. But apart from
that, everything worked peachily, including but not limited to Flash, MP3, HD video. There's also a very nice
system tray integration for your media, regardless of the choice of the player. Very neat.

Event Install

Overall, it went fine and without any problems. Contrast that to the Rolling release if you will. The Wireless
step bug that we saw with Kubuntu has been rectified. The partitions are
not labeled, which makes it more difficult to detect the right target device in multi-boot scenarios.

After that, the installer continued smoothly, quietly, accompanied with an extremely well-designed slide show.
Proper DPI, contrast, scaling and such. A professional work, which shows that QA isn't fairy dust. It requires
long hours. The installation completed successfully.

Event Party On

Now, we're using Horizon. What gives? Well, a few small problems right away. The update applet was complaining
that it didn't have proper authorization to download the packages, so I tried the command line and then the
network died. It happened AGAIN, which makes the hairs under my
armpits tingle. FFS, we've moved on ten kernels since, please fix this nonsense. But my little hack sure did
work around the issue, and I've not seen any problems after that.

Updates & package management

As I said earlier, it worked all right. Not the best, but doable. I am annoyed that you get the language
installation prompt, which should be part of the standard installation set, or at least presented to the user
in a way that actually explains why the extra language packages could be useful. Muon Discover is also behind
USC and friends in terms of usability and appeal.

Desktop

Finally, a reboot away, with the little bugs and glitches behind, I had a fine and presentable Plasma desktop
at my disposal, and I could actually commence to start trying to begin enjoying myself with this distribution.
To be fair, so far, it was behaving, and it had delivered a more pleasant experience than other Plasma desktops
this year. Netrunner 17 Horizon was showing promise of cautious optimism only mildly spoiled by cynicism of old
age and hard experience.

Applications

Roughly 2GB worth of image data sure brings you a lot of stuff. The selection is extremely generous, colorful
and balanced. Some of the stuff may be an overkill, but most of the programs are sensible. Firefox,
Thunderbird, Pidgin, Skype, Steam, GIMP, LibreOffice, VirtualBox, Cheese, Audacious, VLC, KDEnlive, and then
some.

I am not too pleased by the extra browser extensions used in the distro. The repertoire has been tamed
recently, but still, let users choose what they want or need for their system, if any. Then, the digital
signature warning must be the new Firefox thingie announced a few
weeks back.

Smartphone compatibility

Not too promising. Apple iPhone is still a nope, unless you do it
manually. Windows Phone is also
problematic, because Netrunner 17 refused to mount it. This seems to be a KDE or Plasma issue, because Zorin
and Mint Rafaela have had no such troubles. Not an NTFS issue either,
because the distro mounted the Windows 10 partitions beautifully. Last but not the least, Ubuntu Phone is the
only device that actually worked without any glitches.

Bluetooth support

If we recall the Ubuntu family saga, only Kubuntu Werewolf
delivered some semblance of a fully functional Bluetooth stack. Netrunner 17 Horizon does a similar job. It did
complain a little bit about not being able to pair when it did, so it's a false positive. And then Plasma
crashed when trying to send a file to the device. Only once. After that, subsequent transfers worked fine.

Printing

It does work, you just have to use the System Settings menu or the system area, but not a word search invoked
through the main menu. Works means the applet launches, but if you want to print to Samba, you will be an
unhappy camper. Shame.

Resource usage, stability, suspend & resume

Apart from that what I've mentioned already, there were no other crashes. As always, the network stack is the
weakest link. Plasma does feel a little more robust than in the past, but this implementation does not match
openSUSE. Suspend & resume, fast and furious. Resource usage is quite low
in terms of RAM, less than 0.5 GB. The CPU can be quieter, and it does often spike into the double-digit area.
Performance is reasonable. Responsiveness can be slightly sharper.

Battery life

Shiver me puzzled, but for a distro that's relatively lean on resources, battery life ought to be better. Nope.
Only about 2.5 hours, including an auto-dimmed screen. Not the best of results. Then again, the CPU can be more
peaceful.

Customization

I didn't even have to download any new wallpapers. The default set is rad enough.

Conclusion

Netrunner 17 Horizon redeems the Plasma desktop. It is not perfect, but after all the ugly fiascoes and
disappointments we've had, it delivers salvation. There's more work to be done, some bugs to be patched, some
niggles ironed. All in all, though, it's a pretty solid distro. It looks the part, multimedia support is very
good, and Bluetooth is okay. Printing, smartphone support and battery life can definitely be improved or
polished or both.

My biggest fear is the new version might undo all the good work invested in this particular release. But if we
compare to the 16th edition, there are small, incremental
improvements all over the place. Again, not perfect, and some areas still need to be fixed, but that's fine. We
can live with that, as long as we achieve progress and no regressions. Anyhow, if you're looking for a Plasma
experience, this autumn slash winter slash new year, this is the one and only distro out there that delivers
anything beyond tears. In fact, quite all right. 8.75/10. Peace.